“About cigar hand rollers speak scornful words those who don’t recognize the value of work, neither the free and honorable life won by the hands, no matter what job it is!… 1

“Others might speak of chaste and hatred for I’ve heard in those workshops nothing by the eloquence that founds peoples and lights up and improves the souls, and climbs heights and fills up holes, and decorates academies and parliaments!” 2

“… General Chingman from North Carolina relates the wonderful healing powers of the tobacco leaf… The first thing he saw fifty years ago was the way a comrade of his healed the swollen eyes of his horse by applying some tobacco juice on them. Later on, in lands where eyelid swellings are commonplace, he saw how easily people cured themselves as they slept –sometimes for only one single night- with their eyelids covered by a moist tobacco leaf… In another occasion –he admits- he had a terrible sciatica pain. The moment he applied moist tobacco leaves on his hip, the pain was gone.

For foot numbness, the General says, as he suffered from hardened feet because of his many battles, that tobacco leaves turn a rugged mountain range into a soft prairie.” 3

1 Excerpts from the Patria newspaper, New York, March 24, 1893

2 Excerpts from a speech delivered at Hardman Hall, February 17, 1892, known as the Tampa and Key West Prayer.

3 Excerpts from the Tobacco article published in La America, New York, June 1884.

Even though Jose Marti puffed at cigars every once in a while, he was not a regular smoker. However, his entire life was linked to cigar hand rollers, key players in Cuba’s Independence Wars. As a matter of fact, when Marti signed the order to start the war on January 29, 1895 –sent to Juan Gualberto Gomez- his delegate on the island, Estanislao O’Halloran, a cigar hand roller by trade and owner of a Habano factory, rolled a stogie into which the coded message was stuffed, the same message that Gonzalo de Quezada took from New York to Key West, that Juan de Dios Barrios brought to Cuba aboard the Olivette steamer and handed in personally to Juan Gualberto Gomez in Havana to start the uprising.

José Martí